When Your Codebase Is Nearly Old Enough To Vote

As time marches on, more and more FLOSS projects are reaching ages that qualify them as 'venerable'. On the one hand, that rich history of constant improvement provides a robust framework upon which to build. On the other hand, that can lead to sections of the code marked "here be dragons" that haven't been touched in this millennium, and the ever-accelerating speed of technology's march can leave you with a balance-sheet of technical debt that would make anyone quail.

This talk is a case study of Dreamwidth Studios, forked in 2008 from LiveJournal.com, a project that began in 1999. With a quarter-million lines of legacy Perl, it's been hard to decide what to modernize and what to leave alone. Come hear our successes, our failures, and a few horror stories of disasters we've stumbled into along the way.

Denise Paolucci

Denise Paolucci is the co-founder of Dreamwidth Studios (www.dreamwidth.org), a blogging and community platform. She’s been working in open source for sixteen years, and will talk your ear off about accessibility, disability, diversity, creativity, community, privacy, and knitting, although probably not all at the same time.